Thursday, March 31, 2016

Faust Bonino, a 55-year-old nurse in Piombino, Italy was
arrested March 30, 2016 on suspicion of murdering 13 patients between 2014 and
2015. Police named the investigation, which involved several months of
monitoring, the "the killer on the ward.” “The victims were mainly elderly
people with a variety of illnesses.” Most of them were
elderly, but not necessarily sick. Bonino was stationed in a
hospital’s anaesthesia and intensive care units. Traces
of drugs not prescribed to patients were found in bodies of victims. [Robert
St. Estephe; primary source of facts: “Italian nurse accused of 13 murders in
Piombino,” BBC, Mar. 31, 2016]

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

This is the story of a predator who selected male addicts as her targets.

Prosecutors described Kathleen McCluskey, resident in the
famous university town of Cambridge, England, as bearing an “ambivalent
attitude towards men.” She was charged of murdering four of them between 1999
and 2001 by manipulating them to overdose on methadone combined with alcohol.
The woman who is described as always wearing black and “who encouraged friends
to stroke a devil statue in her home” was described in the tabloid press as a
“devil worshipper.”

Kathleen McCluskey was a drug addict and was prescribed
methadone by a government addiction program. She was well versed in the dangers
of overdose and dangerous drug combinations. In her Cambridge home, police
found a copy of the British National Formulary, the “pharmacists’ bible,” which
gives details of prescribed drugs and their effects.

McCluskey’s second alleged murder victim was Marvin Brodie,
32, a man who was “well-liked” but with a drink problem. She got to know him
through a friend and in June 2000 went with him and some other friends to see a
film. During the evening she was heard to say: “I don’t
want to go to prison - I’ll kill you like I killed the rest.” She provided the
man with a fatal concoction that ended his life.

Prosecutor Nigel Godsmark: “Four deaths is just too many to
be a coincidence - the common factor is this lady.” He added: “In each case the
defendant supplied the drugs or supplied the means of taking these drugs.”

A survivor of Catherine McCluskey’s toxic cocktail method is
enlightening: “In November 2001 Peter Bakulinskjy came forward to report an
incident which had happened on Christmas Day 1999. He had drunk methadone with
an unknown additive at Mrs McCluskey’s home and was unconscious for five hours.
McCluskey was later acquitted of administering a toxic substance - methadone -
to him.”

On December 16, 2002, McCluskey was convicted Norwich Crown
Court of two of the four homicides she was charged with – on the reduced charge
of manslaughter. One hearing the verdict Kathleen flew into a rage, shouting:
“This is f*****g ignorance.” When female guards were called to escort the
convict to her cell, she was twice heard screaming “Ignorant b******s.”

On March 19, 2003, McLuskey was sentenced to 10 years in
prison for two manslaughter convictions: 4 years for killing Assali plus 6 year
for killing Brodie. During the hearing the sentencing judge admonished the
murderess: “You have had a sad life. I bear in mind the effect that drugs have
had on you. Nevertheless, although you have a borderline personality disorder,
I have to take into account that you have shown little compassion or remorse for
the deaths of these two men.”

***

***

CHRONOLOGY:

April 1960 – Kathleen McCluskey, Born Kathleen Baxter in
South Yorkshire.

Mohammed Shoja Assadi, 48, known as Martin, lived alone and
was a heavy drinker who was prescribed low level doses of methadone several
years ago, artist.

Marvin Brodie, 32, worked occasionally as a care assistant.

Ray Diaz, 48, was a friend of McCluskey’s.

James McCluskey, 44, was her second husband. They married in
September 2001, eight months after her first husband committed suicide using a
vacuum cleaner pipe attached to his car’s exhaust pipe. Prosecutors later
doubted the suicide ruling.

EXCERPT (p. 212-13): To His Excellency Governor Gayoso, the
petition of Anna Catherine Hartley showeth that whereas she understands that
her son’s pretended wife is making applications to Your Exellency for her son’s
property and that she understands that the said Rachel has set forth that her
son made a will and left what property he had to her, for about nine days
before he died, he said that all that he had in the world should go to his
decrepit mother and his soul to God. Her son was not twenty years of age when
he joined himself to her in marriage . . . . . . . [accuses his wife as the
means of shortening her son’s days and those of others.] Had I not applied to a
man on this creek I should have lost two more of my children as this man declared
in his opinion that they were poisoned, and by several other circumstances and
her threatenings, it appeared evident that she poisoned them. Please direct
Col. Bruin to examine this affair, according to evidences and examinations and
transmitting their depositions to Your Excellency. Sig: Anna Catherine Hartley.
23 Sept. 1794.

EXCERPT (p. 213): Catherine Miles was at
the house of her late father, Mr. John Hartley, about nine months before the
death of her brother, Jacob Hartley, and she heard him at that time declare
that he willed property to his mother and his soul to God. Rachel Hartley was
present and laughed heartily. She believed that her brothers, Jacob and John,
and her sister, Betty, were poisoned. When asked what reason she had for so
believing, she answered that she was told so by Mr. Nicholas Sirlott, a
neighbor who was called in to administer some relief to her brother John and
her sister Christina and who didn’t relieve them. Q. What reason had he that
Rachel Hartley was responsible? A. I have reason to believe that she did
administer it because she threatened to take satisfaction on the family.
She said she would have satisfaction if it was seven years afterwards. She
declared to the truth of what Hezekiah Harman deposed of the dead bodies of her
sister and her brother, Jacob. Catherine Miles, signed with a mark. Bayou
Pierre, 8 Oct. 1794. Before P. Bryan Bruin.

Monday, March 21, 2016

FULL TEXT (Article 1 of 2): John Palmer (Jack) Burns, owner
of a small jewelry shop in downtown East St. Louis, was shot and killed last
night by his wife, Mrs. Lue Burns, following one of the petty quarrels which
had disrupted the Burns household at 735 Post place, East St. Louis, the last
five years.

He was her fourth husband. Nine years ago Mrs. Burns shot
and killed her third husband, Shelby Clay, at their home in Madison, after he
had attacked her with a butcher knife. A witness to both tragedies was Gene
Rodemich, Mrs. Burns’ son by her second marriage, a second cousin and namesake
of Gene Rodemich, the late dance band leader.

Burns, 44 years old, was shot four times and was dead on
arrival at Christian Welfare Hospital. Mrs. Burns, 38, was treated at St.
Mary’s Hospital for hysteria and for a bruise on the head suffered in the
scuffle with her husband, and then removed to jail.

Chief of Police Michael J. O’Rourke told reporters police
had been called to the Burns home several times in the last year by Burns, who
told them he was worried because his wife complained people were persecuting
her.

Mrs. Burns had been been committed by court orders to the
Illinois State Hospital at Alton twice for brief stays within the last five
years on complaint of her husband. In both instances she was discharged when
alienists reported that she was not insane.

~ Police Called Before. ~

She apparently had not grasped the fact that she had killed
her husband until this morning, when she asked about her son. Told that he had
been released on bond but would appear at theCoroner’s inquest, she said: “Is Jack dead? I didn’t mean to kill him. I
was afraid of people.”

~ Quarrel After Dinner. ~

The quarrel last night began shortly after dinner, Mr. and
Mrs. Burns were in the living room. Rodemich, a student, had gone upstairs to
study for his midyear examinations. The negro maid, Leonia Harris, was washing
dishes in the kitchen.

The maid told police she heard Mrs. Burns begin to denounce
her husband because he had forgotten to bring home some new clothes for her
which had been delivered at the jewelry store.

“Mr. Burns told her
he was tired of havingher packages
delivered to the jewelry store,” the maid sad. Mrs. Burns told him she needed
the clothes for work tomorrow, and Mr. Burns to stop cursing his mother, and he
and Mr. Burns started to fight. Mr. Burns slipped into the downstairs bedroom,
and the next thing I heard was a shot.”

~ Fired Six Shots. ~

Mrs. Burns had gone to the bedroom to get a .32 caliber
revolver which she had brought several months ago. As the scuffle between Burns
and Rodemich moved into the hall, she fired at Burns.She fired six shots in
all, then told her son to call police.

When police arrived they found Burns lying outside the house
on the back steps. He had been shot in the left eye, chin, throat and chest.
There were powder burns on his face, indicating he had been shot at close
range.

Mrs. Burns was lying on the dining room floor. She had a cut
on her head and was moaning hysterically. The revolver was clutched in her
right hand.

She was too hysterical at Police Headquarters to tell a
coherent story, but she told police that fights in her home were frequent and
that she and her husband had come to blows as recently as two weeks ago. She
and Burns, who had operated the jewelry store at 320 Collinsville avenue for 16
years, were married seven years ago.

~ Similar Considerations. ~

The circumstances under which she killed her third husband
were somewhat similar in those of last night. She and Clay quarreled
frequently, and she shot him four times after he had slashed her on the arm
with a knife. A verdict of justifiable homicide was returned at the Coroner’s
inquest.

She told police her second husband was Edwin Rodemich, a
railroad engineer, and a brother of Gene Rodemich. She said he was drowned
about 18 years ago when he fell off the cab of his train into an ashpit filled
with water.

Mrs. Burns was unable to recall the name of her first
husband, whom she had married as a young girl. “His name just doesn’t come to
me,” she said.

[“Kills Her Fourth Husband, As She Did No. 3, In Row – Mrs.
Lue Burns, 38, Shoots East St. Louis Jeweler Four Times as Son Looks On.” St.
Louis Post-Dispatch (Mo.), Jan. 24, 1941, p. 1]

***

***

FULL TEXT (Article 2 of 2): Mrs. Lue Burns, in their home at
753 Post street, was found not guilty of murder late yesterday in City Judge
William F. Borders’ court.

The jury of six men and six women deliberated three hours.
On the first ballot, the Post-Dispatch learned, one juror voted for conviction
of murder, six for conviction of manslaughter, and five for acquittal. The
second ballot showed seven for conviction of manslaughter and five for
acquittal. Four additional ballots were taken.

Forewoman of the jury was Mrs. Mildred Weidmann of
Belleville, wife of a State grain inspector. She told reporters she was unable
to recall how the men and women on the jury divided on the early ballots.

Mrs. Burns, 38 years old, heard the verdict with no show of
emotion, except that her face reddened. Later, talking with reporters, she
laughed and smiled, and said: “Justice always wins.”

She had told the jury she killed Burns as he was choking her
21-year-old son, Gene Rodemich, who had intervened when her husband “hit me,
beat and kicked me.” The quarrel began, she testified, after dinner, when she
asked her husband to return to his jewelry shop in downtown East St. Louis to
get some parcels, purchases of lingere which she had ordered delivered C. O. D.
to the store.

The weapon with which she killed Burns was a revolver she
purchased last October “to protect myself.” Burns was shot four times, but in
her testimony she did not recall how many shots she fired.

Mrs. Burns shot and killed her third husband, Shelby Clay,
when he attacked her with a kitchen knife. Her second husband, Edwin Rodemich,
a locomotive engineer, was killed when he fell from his cab.

Saturday, March 12, 2016

The New York woman is said to have been married to eleven
men, and it is asserted that she has never procured a divorce from any of them,
though none of the eleven husbands is dead. She is reported to have made a
practice of marrying men who had money, and it is charged that, after getting
all they had, she would treat them so badly that they were glad to leaver her
at any cost. The story goes that she would then seek a fresh victim.

Friday, March 11, 2016

Two Filipino nursers were convicted of murdering patients in
July through August 1975 at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Ann Arbor,
Michigan. Following a 13-week trial the two VA nurses Filipina Narcisco and
Lenora Perez were convicted conspiring to commit three murders on July 13,
1977.

The nurses were accused of deliberately injecting a muscle
relaxant, Pavulon, into the intravenous feeding tubes of nine VA patients,
resulting in breathing failure. There were more than 50 such breathing failures
at the Ann Arbor VA Hospital in the Summer of 1975. The prosecution was highly
controversial involving the charge that the FBI deliberately withheld
exculpatory evidence. On appeal the nurses had the conviction overturned and
the prosecution elected not to pursue a retrial. It was the mentally ill VA
nursing supervisor Betty Jakim, 51, seems to have confessed to having committed
the murders when institutionalised at the University of Michigan Neuropsychiatric
Institute. She committed suicide in Sebring, Florida on February 3, 1975. She
had attempted suicide twice before.

[Robert St. Estephe, Oct. 16, 2015]

***

The case of Betty Jakim is exhaustively covered in online
posts of the original newspaper clippings.

FULL TEXT: The Cologne Gazette says the police have arrested
a woman who is suspected of poisoning over fifty babies who were in her charge.
The public prosecutor is in possession of a mass of evidence against the woman.
He is now trying to discover if she had any accomplices.

Monday, March 7, 2016

FULL TEXT: Bucharest, March 2. – The preliminary
investigation into sensational criminal charges which involve the name of the
late Prince Mensikoff, one of the greatest of native boyards has just been
concluded, and the arrest, of his widow, now the wife of M. Diarne, formerly
mayor of a small town in the neighborhood of Bucharest, and that of Diarne
himself, is ordered by the court. The charges are murder against the mother, and
murder and assault for the purpose of gain against Diarne.

The prince, upon his death. left a for tune of several
millions of francs to his four children, three girls and one small boy. The
mother was appointed trustee of the state. She became enamored of Diarne, and
five years ago married him. Since then the boy died under suspicious
circumstances, and two of the girls have disappeared. It is thought their
mother and husband desire to become possessed of the property left to them by
their father. The prosecuting judge of Bucharest has ordered a search of the
house and the extensive gardens for the girl’s body, and that the body of the
little boy be exhumed. The eldest daughter, who is the principal witness for
the crown, has been placed under the protection of the judge.

Lady Blanche, the first witness in her own behalf, testified
that his lordship went to the race meeting and also to Brighton for weeks
together and refused to allow her to accompany him. He had sworn at her and
called her a prostitute. Her husband often spent the night in drinking and
retired to rest at 10 o’clock in the morning.

Sunday, March 6, 2016

FULL TEXT: A guilty conscience has discovered a series of crimes. Frances Bennett, a
woman living at Ruardean Hill, in the Forest of Dean, being
ill, sent for the Reverend Henry Formby, the Curate of the
place, and told him that she had successively killed
six children which she had had by a man named Yapp. As
the first five were born, they were drowned, and buried beneath the floor of a brewhouse; the last lived for two days; but being
sickly, she poisoned it. The Police searched the brewhouse, and dug up the six
skeletons; and an inquest was held on the skeletons on Tuesday; but Bennett, who had recovered, now denied her story. The
Curate and her sister, however, deposed too distinctly to her confessions when
ill for her to retract; and she and Yapp were
detained in custody; the inquest being adjourned. One, which seems to have been
the chief source of solicitude when Bennett was ill, was the desire to have the six bodies
removed from the barn and buried in a churchyard.

FULL TEXT: London, July 23. – Special dispatches from Madrid
state that the bodies of 26 infants in rough deal boxes have been discovered in
the tower of St. Peter’s Church in Seville. It is supposed that a wholesale
crime has been committed by the church warden, Orellana, and his wife, and they
have been arrested.

Saturday, March 5, 2016

FULL TEXT: The News published yesterday a brief account of a
terrible crime committed near Big Springs, Nebraska, where a wanton woman named
Walroth caused one of her paramours to murder another and throw the body into
the Platte. Afterwards she confessed the deed, overcome by remorse. The Omaha
Herald prints there facts in detail, together with the following additional
particulars:

As she finished her terrible narrative she fell down in a
swoon and the men hastily left the house. They went to Big Springs and
telegraphed these facts to Sheriff Zwiefel, and his deputy, Tom Beson, started
immediately on a hand car to the Walroth ranch, which is near the railroad
track. He arrived there at one o’clock in the morning. Duboise, unconscious
that the guilty woman had divulged his secret, was asleep in the house, and
came to the door when the deputy sheriff rapped. As he was in the act of
lighting a lamp, the officer snapped the handcuffs on him, and Duboise, turning
deadly pale, exclaimed, “What do you want me for? That murder?” The clicking
of the hand-cuffs awakened the woman and she came out of her room shrieking for
mercy. They were both taken in custody and brought to Sidney, and locked up.
The preliminary examination was begun to-day, but the attorney for the defense
asking a continuance was granted until next Monday. Men sent to search for the
body discovered it half a mile below the place of murder. The river at that point
is very wide and shallow, filled with constantly shifting banks of sand. A
little piece of blue cloth on a bar in the middle of the river attracted their
attention. Closely scrutinizing the object, they discovered a half submurged
[sic] pair of pants, and by jumping from bar to bar, and wading the shallow
channels, they reached the sand bank. A human hand was protruding from the wet
sand, and by digging with their fingers they soon exhumed the body of Phillips.
Two bullet holes through his head corresponded exactly with the account of the
half crazed woman. Part of her statement is probably untrue. Last night in a
delirious sleep, she repeated the whole story with some changes which show her
intimate knowledge of the deed, which enabled her to go into the minutia of the
crime, was gained by her personal presence at the scene. She was at the elbow
of the murderer, prompting the deed. Her personal history is remarkable. She
was married to Walroth four or five years ago; lived with him a year, was
divorced for improper conduct; remarried to him after less than a year had
passed; divorced again for adultery; married a man named Rurdy; was divorced
from him and once more remarried Walroth a year ago. She has confessed that
this was not the first victim she has put away through the agency of Duboise.
All these events have occurred in a life less than twenty-two years duration.

EXCERPT: The most evil of the lot was chief accomplice and
disciple of Mrs. Fazekas, Susanna Olah, called Susi, or Aunt Susi, by her
clients. She operated in Nagyrev a sort of franchise of the Fazekas murder
business, dispensing arsenic, which her patrons called “Aunt Susi’s Inheritance
Powders.” The women purchasing arsenic from Aunt Susi expressed genuine fear at
her presence in court, claiming that her eyes “glowed ruby red at night,” and
telling the jury that she kept scores of poisonous snakes and lizards in her
hut and these she had trained to creep into their beds of those who might
inform on her.

Susi’s sister, Lydia Olah, a misshapen crone of seventy,
defied the charges of the court. According to Posslyednia Novosti, a Russian daily published in Paris, Lydia
cried out during her trial, “We are not assassins! We did not stab our
husbands. We did not hang them or drown them either! They died from poison and
this was a pleasant death for them!” She was later condemned to death.

[Jay Robert Nash, Look for the Woman, A Narrative
Encyclopedia of Female Poisoners, Kidnappers, Thieves, Extortionists, Swindlers
and Spies From Elizabethan Times to the Present, Evans, 1981, pp. 158-9.]

Friday, March 4, 2016

FULL TEXT: Moncton, N. B., July 20. – An unmarked woman
named Ross, mother of three children, all of whom are dead, has been arrested
at Caraquet charged with infanticide. She forced a spoon down the throat of her
child, and when an attempt was made to extricate it it broke, one part
remaining in the child’s throat. The infant died after suffering terrible
agony. It is now suspected that the woman made away with her other two
children, who died a short time ago.

FULL TEXT: A terrible story of infanticide comes from
Caraquet, a village in Gloucester county, N. B. A short time ago, and within a
few days of each other, two illegitimate children of an unmarried woman named
Ross died and were buried without any suspicion being aroused as to foul
dealings. Their mother had a third child, an infant girl, and on Sunday this
one also expired, after suffering terribly from injuries inflicted by its
parent.

Mrs. Norman, with whom the woman boarded, heard cries of
pain issuing from the latter’s apartment. On entering the room she saw that the
mother was forcing a spoon down the infant’s throat. Mrs. Norman seized the
child and attempted to remove the spoon from its mouth, but it had been in so
far that it refused to come and broke into two pieces, one piece remaining in
the throat. The child died in fearful agony three hours afterward. The woman
was arrested and an inquest held yesterday, when the jury pronounced her
insane, and she is to be placed in an asylum. It is believed that the other two
children were murdered, and there is talk of having their graves opened to see
whether such was really the case. The people say that the woman is not insane
and that she should be prosecuted for murder.